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The Hill reported Saturday that the three farthest-Left Supreme Court justices – all women – collectively freaked out over the recent decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor allowing parents to opt their children out of lessons pushing LGBTQetc. material.

The case stemmed from the Montgomery County, Maryland school system requiring the reading of 13 “LGBTQ+-inclusive” texts in the English and Language Arts curriculum for kids from pre-K through 12th grade. Thirteen. Is the school system requiring that many texts on topics and themes that actually further children’s education, or just on gender indoctrination?

Children 5-11 years old were being required to read or listen to stories such as Prince & Knight, about two male knights who marry each other; Love Violet, about two young girls falling in love; and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, about a biological girl transitioning to a boy.

Not a single one of these works promoting gender confusion and subverting the nuclear family appears on any list of literary classics. One might ask, why is such a significant chunk of the curriculum being devoted to books that have no value for the teaching of English and Language Arts? Why prioritize them at the expense of classic works of children’s literature that have stood the test of time?

The answer is that educators today are utterly uninterested in passing down the glorious legacy of the Western canon, the best that has been thought and said in human endeavor. They are not interested in challenging, exercising, and expanding young minds. Instead, they are social justice activists imposing a radical ideology on the young, impressionable minds in their charge in order to drive a wedge between them and their parents, whose traditional values these activists can’t “deconstruct” fast enough. The ultimate aim is the “fundamental transformation,” as Barack once put it, of Western civilization.

Montgomery County school administrators made it clear to teachers that the aforementioned assignments were mandatory; parents would not be allowed to opt out. Teachers were also instructed to “disrupt” the thinking of students whose views of gender dissented from far-Left orthodoxy. If a child even questioned how someone born a boy could become a girl, teachers were expected to say, “When we’re born, people make a guess about our gender and label us ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ based on our body parts. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong.”

Seriously, how do progressives function in the real world telling themselves such blatant lies? Throughout human history, normal people with a basic grasp of reality – in other words, not ideologues living in a utopian fantasy – have known that people do not have to guess whether a newborn is male or female, much less that they frequently get it wrong. It’s disheartening to realize we live in such stupid times.

Many families sought to opt out of these indoctrination lessons for obvious reasons, but the school board refused, citing the irrational excuse that so many families objected that it would be burdensome on the school to allow them to withdraw.

A 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court wisely ruled in favor of Montgomery County parents’ right to opt their children out of this progressive brainwashing. Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion. “A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill,” Alito wrote:

Many Americans, like the parents in this case, believe that biological sex reflects divine creation, that sex and gender are inseparable, and that children should be encouraged to accept their sex and to live accordingly. But the challenged storybooks encourage children to adopt a contrary viewpoint.

Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote, called the ruling a “major victory for religious parents and religious freedom across America.”

“These books are, in fact, teaching explicit sexual orientation and gender identity issues as early as pre-K,” Will Haun, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told The Daily Signal. The reading instructions, he said, “require teachers to make dismissive statements about a student’s religious beliefs, to shame children who disagree, and to teach as facts things that some would not agree are facts.”

Predictably, the response from the Left was apocalyptic outrage, even though the public overwhelmingly supported these parents. One propagandist at HuffPost (is that site still around?) declared the decision “another victory for right-wing culture warriors who have been leading the movement to remove books from classrooms.” The Left has been waging a culture war against America for over half a century, but when conservatives push back, we’re condemned as the culture warriors – as if we started it. Also, it’s a lie to claim we’re leading a movement to remove books from classrooms – we’re leading a movement to remove sexually explicit indoctrination from our children’s education, but HuffPost chose to leave out that detail.

In their dissent to the decision, the radical Justices fretted that “the damage to America’s public education system will be profound” and “threatens the very essence of public education.” (In fact, nothing has been more profoundly damaging to public education than progressivism, but I digress.) Justice Sonia “wise Latina” Sotomayor fear-mongered that there “will be chaos for this nation’s public schools” and that education and children will “suffer” if parents are allowed to opt their children out. She also worried that the ruling would have a “chilling effect” on schools offering such classes in the future, and that multicultural inclusiveness would cease to become a priority in public education. One can only hope.

Alito blasted this “deliberately blinkered view.” He wrote, “Only by air-brushing the record can the dissent claim that the books and instruction are just about exposure and kindness.”

The Left’s outrage is rooted in their conviction that children belong not to their parents but to the community collectively – just as Karl Marx envisioned. Wisconsin Democrat Rep. Lee Snodgrass, for example, once insisted, “If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education, they should homeschool or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.”

In an even starker example, Iowa school board member Rachel Wall lifted the veil when she said the quiet part out loud: “The purpose of a public ed is to not teach kids what the parents want. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client is not the parent, but the community.”

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the civil war currently underway in America, between Americans who believe that children’s best interests are served by their parents, and those who believe children exist to serve the best interests of the State.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior